A fast heuristic for solving the D1EC coloring problem

In this paper we propose an efficient heuristic for solving the Distance-1 Edge Coloring problem (D1EC) for the on-the-fly assignment of orthogonal wireless channels in wireless as soon as a topology change occurs. The coloring algorithm exploits the simulated annealing paradigm, i.e., a generalization of Monte Carlo methods for solving combinatorial problems. We show that the simulated annealing-based coloring converges fast to a suboptimal coloring scheme even for the case of dynamic channel allocation. However, a stateful implementation of the D1EC scheme is needed in order to speed-up the network coloring upon topology changes. In fact, a stateful D1EC reduces the algorithm’s convergence time by more than 60% in comparison to stateless algorithms.